The One Practice Hiding Right Under Your Nose

Tantra’s most important yoga of all, the one that opens up Who You Really Are.

Yesterday afternoon my 12-year-old had a sinus headache so he took an ibuprofen with a glass of water and laid down. A couple of hours later, while we were running some errands, I asked him how his head felt. “I feel fine,” he answered, a little surprised. “Mom, isn’t it funny that we don’t even notice when we feel fine?”

Yeah, babe, it is. Western culture doesn’t really encourage us to feel fine, because, presumably, there’s no money in it. It likes to dangle the promise of feeling fine, if we just purchase this drug or buy that wrinkle remover or lease the silver Corvette. There’s nothing wrong with any of those things. Thaddeus felt fine after popping a pill and resting, but the point I’m making is he didn’t notice. Feeling fine is something we chase but don’t really sit with.

This is one thing I adore about lifestyle Tantra is that it is a spiritual practice to notice when we feel fine. Relishing and delighting in the moments of feeling fine, satiated, loved, awed, delighted is the pathway of understanding something particularly slippery: Who You Really Are and What it All Means.

I am madly in love with this translation of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra. In this arpeggio (below) of sutras 47 -54, (a sutra is a teaching), Shiva takes feeling fine pretty seriously, and His examples of what feels fine are all over the map:

47 – Contemplating the memory of making love

48 – Seeing a loved one after a long absence

49 – Savoring chocolate or ripe fruit

50 – Enjoying music, food, fragrances, and colors

51 – Feeling carried away in a pleasure

52 – The relief of a soft bed for a tired body

52 – Gazing into to the sky during the day and night

54 – An epiphany, a realization, the ah-ha moment when wisdom pops into place

What strikes me about all these feeling-fine moments is their ordinariness. Food. Music. Colors. Nature. Rocking a baby or sitting by the fire. The very first pleasure in this arpeggio isn’t even a direct experience–it’s just a memory of really good sex. Sutra 54’s pleasure is equally invisible–the feeling of clarity. Sutra 48 speaks to one pleasure, like hugging someone you haven’t seen in a while; Sutra 50 lumps lots of sensuous pleasures together, as if at a party. Sutra 52 invites Shakti to revel in both the day and night sky–ordinary pleasures that would take several hours at the very least. How many of us focus on feeling fine for that long?

This feeling fine is a lifestyle, Shiva says. There are no rules for what should feel fine or long you should do it. But, Shiva advises not to underestimate the importance, as if each feeling-fine moment is the most holy of yogas, as if the Authentic You–your sat nam–lies in the moment of noticing when you feel fine.

Live in alertness for such a moment, my Beloved,
As if it were your one meeting with the Creator.

-Shiva, Sutra 51

What are your pleasures, you are so loved by the Creator? What do YOU really enjoy? Invisible or colorful, tangible or etheric, fleeting or hours-long, happening now or just a memory? What’s your pleasure? To revel is the most holy of yogas.

In our meditation club this month, wonderful soul, we will be settling into a Tantric trance to revel in the feeling-fine moments Shiva suggests in Sutras 47-54. As you meditate, you’ll be tuned to the ordinary ecstasy awaiting in the everyday. In so reveling, you discover what Sutra 51 calls “your true body.” In other words, what you enjoy is the gateway to Who You Really Are. No wonder practicing feeling fine is Tantra’s most important yoga of all.